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then, as John Stole had sunk further into Concordia, and Hope Stole had had to fight harder to keep him afloat, Clara had gone, with her mother’s reluctant permission, to visit Godfather by herself.
    And on those days—oh, on those days—his stories had grown in magnitude and frequency. He would wrap her in his coat as he had when she was little, or sit with her by the hearth with mugs of spiced coffee, and tell her one of his peculiar, dark stories in hushed tones. Afterward, at home, she would drift into dreamlands of blind dragons and singing palaces, and hooded men living in mountain clouds with the birds.
    Clara frowned at him. “But she was my mother, not yours. I deserve to know why her corpse was desecrated in this way, even if it is dangerous to know.”
    Godfather was still for a moment, regarding her, and then he dropped into his rickety rocking chair, resigned.
    Clara gave a halfhearted smile. He was cracking. She knelt before him. “Tell me what the symbols mean, Godfather. Why were they . . . They were carved  . . .”
    She paused, grief flooding her.
    He took pity on her. “The statue was given to me, as I’ve always told you. You remember?”
    It was all he would ever say when asked about it. “It was a gift,” he would say, scowling, and he would stab whatever lay nearest him with whatever sharp tool he held at the time, promptly ending the conversation.
    â€œYes, I remember,” she said, trying to be patient. Where Godfather was concerned, kernels of great, frightening truth were often buried in ramblings and dark fancies—if one had the persistence to listen through the nonsense and find them. “But you never told me who gave it to you.”
    His mouth twisted. “It was given to me by a mad queen. Or at least an angry one.”
    â€œI beg your pardon?”
    â€œIt was a punishment, a taunt. You see, we thought we had escaped, but then at the last moment—” He clapped his hands together, startling one of his sparrows off its perch. “And it’s bound with a strange magic, a thick and twisty one. You don’t know how diligently I have worked to find an answer, to understand what they mean, and how it has smarted—how it has eaten at me, Clara—but I think I’ve finally done it.”
    He rose to his feet and approached the statue. With one long finger he traced a symbol on the statue’s chest, and then another on its shoulder. “I used to wonder, do the symbols tell a story? This particular piece of the queen’s magic was unlike anything I had ever seen.” He paused, smiling absently. “ Then. But now—now I’m close.”
    Clara was barely keeping her temper. “Magic. You’re telling me that those symbols are some sort of magic.”
    â€œWell, they aren’t magic, no, but rather I’ve come to understand them as a sort of manifestation of magic. A cruel, vengeful one. I’m not sure the symbols themselves mean anything at all, actually. I think they are merely the remnants of what is left behind when terrible magic isperformed.” He gazed at the statue’s face as though looking at something far away. “Terrible magic,” he whispered. “Terrible. And I regret nothing I have done.”
    Clara went to him, slowly. Terrible magic, mad queens, vengeance. They were familiar words, ones Clara had heard in Godfather’s stories since she was a small girl.
    Hope Stole had brought Godfather—Drosselmeyer, he claimed was his name—in from the streets when Clara was still a baby. Hope had seen him performing on the road, a common street magician—but then, so much more than that. She had always said she sensed a talent in him, a diamond talent, and that she could not bear to leave him out there on the freezing streets without proper tools or work space. He would be part of the family, Clara’s mother had said, as a